I’m a big fan of your philosophical writing and your attempts to philosophically defend and refine utilitarianism and effective altruism. I also really like your more general idea here of pushing people to think less about avoiding wrongdoing and towards thinking more about rightdoing.
I think one thing I’d wonder is what it means to make something a “central life project” and what kind of demandingness this implies. Is GWWC membership sufficient? Is 30min of volunteering a week sufficient? This is the hard part I think about satisficing views (even though I personally am definitely a satisficier when it comes to ethics).
I’m also curious what you mean by “[y]ou could accept any number of views about partiality and/or priority” since I think this actually runs counter to one of the core tenets of what I think of effective altruism, which is the radical empathy/impartiality of extending our care to strangers, nonhuman animals, future people, etc. In fact, I often think you gain a lot more by convincing people to adopt the radical empathy and “per dollar effectiveness maximization” views of effective altruism even if they then don’t maximize their efforts / make EA a central life project. That is, I think someone devoting 1% of their income to The Humane League will create more benefit for general welfare than another person devoting 10% of their income to charities that laypeople typically think of when they think they are helping the general welfare.
I think the main way to rescue this is to insist strongly on the radical impartiality part but not insist on making it the sole thing a person does with their resources, or even their resources set aside to philanthropy.
Right, I agree that beneficence should be impartial. What I had in mind was that one can combine a moderate degree of impartial beneficence with significant partiality in other areas of one’s life (e.g. parenting). Thanks for flagging that this didn’t come through clearly enough.
re: “central life project”, this is deliberately vague, and probably best understood in scalar terms: the more, the better. My initial aim here is just to get more people on board with adopting it as a project that they take seriously. I don’t think I can give a precise specification of where to draw the line. But also, I don’t really want to be drawing attention to the baseline minimum, because that shouldn’t be the goal.
I’m a big fan of your philosophical writing and your attempts to philosophically defend and refine utilitarianism and effective altruism. I also really like your more general idea here of pushing people to think less about avoiding wrongdoing and towards thinking more about rightdoing.
I think one thing I’d wonder is what it means to make something a “central life project” and what kind of demandingness this implies. Is GWWC membership sufficient? Is 30min of volunteering a week sufficient? This is the hard part I think about satisficing views (even though I personally am definitely a satisficier when it comes to ethics).
I’m also curious what you mean by “[y]ou could accept any number of views about partiality and/or priority” since I think this actually runs counter to one of the core tenets of what I think of effective altruism, which is the radical empathy/impartiality of extending our care to strangers, nonhuman animals, future people, etc. In fact, I often think you gain a lot more by convincing people to adopt the radical empathy and “per dollar effectiveness maximization” views of effective altruism even if they then don’t maximize their efforts / make EA a central life project. That is, I think someone devoting 1% of their income to The Humane League will create more benefit for general welfare than another person devoting 10% of their income to charities that laypeople typically think of when they think they are helping the general welfare.
I think the main way to rescue this is to insist strongly on the radical impartiality part but not insist on making it the sole thing a person does with their resources, or even their resources set aside to philanthropy.
Thanks Peter!
Right, I agree that beneficence should be impartial. What I had in mind was that one can combine a moderate degree of impartial beneficence with significant partiality in other areas of one’s life (e.g. parenting). Thanks for flagging that this didn’t come through clearly enough.
re: “central life project”, this is deliberately vague, and probably best understood in scalar terms: the more, the better. My initial aim here is just to get more people on board with adopting it as a project that they take seriously. I don’t think I can give a precise specification of where to draw the line. But also, I don’t really want to be drawing attention to the baseline minimum, because that shouldn’t be the goal.
Thanks! Both of those approaches sounds justifiable to me.